a moment of clarity

Holy Shit, I Remembered My Password

For at least as long as it takes me to procrastinate doing both my homework and my novel for NaNoWriMo.

So it looks like the last thing I wrote was a book review for Rage of the Old Gods back in July.

Fuck me sideways that was a long time ago. But I did warn you that I was going to be going MIA… Besides, that gave you plenty of time to go buy and read Tyler’s book.

You did go buy and read Tyler’s book, right?

OK, so what brings me back today, on a weekend of all things?

BLIZZCON!

I haven’t had much opportunity to log in to WoW at all lately, but BlizzCon virtual stream has become a “thing” for me to receive as a birthday gift and I even know some peeps that got to head out and attend in person this year. Lucky bastards, each and every one of you.

And while this BlizzCon didn’t provide any jaw-dropping “OMG I DIDN’T SEE THAT COMING” moments, if did get me pumped up about the Blizzard franchises in general, which just basically made me feel even more guilty about not having time to play WoW.

I swear I’ll do a “what does WoW mean to me now” sort of post. Eventually.

But I’ve been busting ass at work for months. I’ve had to take time off because I was close to capping my bank of time off… but due to deadlines – I HAD TO WORK THOSE DAYS.

So yeah.

I took Friday off and I fucking watched BlizzCon.

If you want to know what happened, just troll through MMOChamp, they’ve got basically everything.

Except for the one fucking slide I specifically wrote down to go look at later. Seriously, if you know where a copy of the “New Raid Structure” slide ended up, please link in the comments below and I will bestow upon you one million internet karma cookies.

I would like to talk about a few of the announcements that caught my attention.

But first. The CONTENT of the stream was great. The QUALITY of the stream blew a donkey.

Imagine you are playing WoW on a computer with power comparable to that of the toaster in your kitchen. Now imagine dropping into an old-school 40-man raid. It’s Onyxia. And someone just got feared into the whelps.

You can’t handle it.

Judging from the responses on the internet at large, I was not alone in this regard. I blame DirectTV.

But when I was getting better than 2-3 FPS (I shit you not), there was some great stuff.

For instance, there are 572 candle models in the game. And the best quote, “Fuck you, we’ll take your candle.”

As in, build your own fucking fort (in the Draenor zone of your choice. Oh? I didn’t mention that? Yeah, we get to see Draenor before it gets asploded. There’s timey-wimey, wibbly-wobbly stuff involved).

Build a fort, collect followers, send them on quests. Mini game within the game, which frankly, right now is all I have time for. Maybe it will be different by then.

The adventure guide. WHERE HAS THIS BEEN?

The last few patches have left a real sour taste in my mouth. I log in and am immediately lost. Without having the time to research EXTERNAL sources to figure out where I need to be and what I need to be killing/collecting/protecting, it’s like there’s too much to do and nothing to do all at the same time.

The adventure guide is being laid out as a path customized for your character. You’ve been doing a lot of PvP – maybe you should check out this new battleground that just opened. Hey, you’re an engineer – did you know there was a cool mount you can get? At your level and ilevel, you should look at these dungeons/raids to work on your progression.

I need this. For reasons.

Huge changes coming to the raiding scene. But because I assumed that MMOChamp would have that slide with ALL THE OTHER ONES, I didn’t take notes and just wrote down to go look at the slide later.

So my fuzzy recollection is that the new “heroic” is called Mythic and is for 20 players. Not 10, not 25, 20. No flexing, this is 20 hardcore players.

Everything else… seems to have a flex element… but I don’t have a copy of that slide so don’t quote me.

New character models?

Kick. Ass.

Much ass kicking to be had.

Confession time.

The new male gnome, still totally puntable.

But the female gnome… might just be too cute to punt.

Shhhh…. you didn’t hear that from me.

What about everything else?

I had no interest in Hearthstone until I saw that I get the Elite Tauren Chieftain card. Totally want to play that now.

Heroes of the Storm?

Sign me the fuck up!

League of Legends held my attention for about… 2 weeks? And then I was told that the character I enjoyed playing sucked and I should be playing this other character that I didn’t like… (I have since received an apology for that, he realized that sometimes you just have to let people play for fun and not worry about min-maxxing at the lower levels. And no, it wasn’t Tir.)

So LoL fell by the wayside. But the game play intrigued me.

The video footage (and the cinematic) for HotS had me. I want to play that game.

D3 expansion looks interesting. I would definitely like to get back into crushing some demons. I just need 10x the hours in a day to get to all this cool stuff.

All in all, it was a good first day. I’m looking forward to the Blizzard movie panel tomorrow and some of the general Q&A.

Here’s what I’m hoping gets covered:

No one asked about female ogres. We get a whole fucking ogre civilization at their pinnacle and still not a female ogre in sight. Or maybe they are there… hiding in plain sight. Scary.

With all the updates to the character models, including expanding the form used for cloaks so they now flow more naturally, will I ever be able to untuck my tabard?

There was talk about the Dragonmaw clan and how they wouldn’t have really existed on Draenor since there are no native dragons. Where the hell did the nether drakes come from, then? Are they demon dragons? (Feel free to link me to a wiki page, I’m too lazy to look it up myself.)

Dragons were brought to Draenor by Deathwing. He wanted a place to hide his eggs so the other Aspects wouldn’t make omelets out of them. When the planet went kablooey, the Twisting Nether mutated them into Nether Dragons.

As for BlizzCon, I’m honestly pretty underwhelmed by what I’ve seen so far. The story for Warlords seems confusing at best, and there’s really only one new feature. Garrisons do seem cool, but they’re not enough on their own. At the risk of being “that guy,” it kind of feels like Blizzard was phoning it in this time.

Heroes of the Storm looks interesting, though. I’ve never been one for MOBAs or competitive gaming in general, but… Damn, that does look cool.

The cinematic was amazing. When Tir got home, I insisted he look it up and watch it.

I think part of the “meh” is that we’ve known *everything* going into this BlizzCon. Hearthstone is already in beta. We’ve been watching the legal battle about the name for Heroes of the Storm for over a year now, and with people watching Blizzard like a hawk, we already knew the name of the expansion.

For me, this BlizzCon is sort of a recentering and finding the home position for all these different products. We’re not catapulting any of them forward but we’re finding out exactly where they are and what the plan is for each.

Some people have been having issues with the newer Nvidia drivers. Most of the reason why her computer attempted to poop on top of Galleon is due to her CPU being teh old. I keep telling her this, but she doesn’t listen to me.